Around 1639 Stephen Daye operated the first printing press in British North America at Cambridge, Massachusetts. The press served Puritan religious, educational, and civic needs in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Its arrival made printed sermons, laws, almanacs, and psalm texts part of colonial life and prepared the way for the Bay Psalm Book in 1640.

The Cambridge press transformed New England's literary culture by giving Puritan devotional verse and scriptural paraphrase a local printed form. The Bay Psalm Book became a landmark in English-language printing in America, showing how poetry, worship, translation, and communal identity overlapped. It also foreshadowed later encounters between print and Indigenous languages, including missionary translation projects that preserved and reshaped Native speech in colonial texts.